He found clean sheets in the chest of drawers. He made the bed, got into it deliberately early. Let her come home to a dark flat. He read for a respectable fifteen minutes, then switched off the lamp. He thought it might be hard to fall asleep, but it wasn’t. He dreamed that a student came to his office and asked him what it meant, and when he asked what what meant, she said, last night, when we were together; but he had no memory of what she was suggesting, he wouldn’t have done that, why would he have done that, when she wasn’t even objectively very attractive? So he tried to tell her that it had never happened, or that it could never happen again, and to persuade her to keep it to herself, but she started crying so loudly that all his colleagues left their offices and came along the corridor to investigate. He could literally see them putting it together as they rallied around the girl, giving her their jackets to wear, putting their arms around her and making her sit on their laps, all the time glaring at David. The hostility in the room was incredible. He was sweating. He could hardly move. He was filled with a sense of absolute dread that he had completely fucked everything up, everything – Claire, the job, his whole career – for this stupid crying girl whom he didn’t even like. Even as she sat on his colleague’s bony knees, she kept reaching out to him, and there was something in her hand …